Interview June 26, 2006 by Daniel Gautreau (www.danieltv.com) of Bruce
Ellison, Leonard Pelletierīs first lawyer, at the World Peace Forum,
Vancouver, B.C., Canada. About 25 minutes in length. The video is
downloadable, or viewable on-line, in QuickTime format (35.4 MB) at: http://www.danieltv.com/movies/interview_bruce_ellison.mov.
To view the video in Flash format see: http://www.danieltv.com/. To order
a copy on CD contact info@grahamdefense.org.
[Video of John Graham walking into the Vancouver court house June 23,
2006.]
Terry LaLiberte (John Grahamīs lawyer): If he is extradited, based on what
happened to Arlo Looking Cloud, his co-accused, he will not get a fair
trial. It was a four-day joke, the effort against Mr. Looking Cloud, he
didnīt stand a chance. If that same thing was to happen, the same type of
approach, heīll be going to jail if he goes to the States.
[Video of Bruce Ellison speaking.]
Bruce Ellison (BE): My name is Bruce Ellison. Iīve been asked to talk
about the United States Governmentīs war against the Indigenous civil and
human rights movement, particularly the American Indian Movement and
parallels with what is going on today in America.
Daniel Gautreau (DG): How is it going on today?
BE: The current state of domestic security operations and climate within
the United States - I believe this has been 30 years at least in the
making, and a lot of what was done to the American Indian Movement in an
effort to destroy it as a movement, to eliminate dissent by Indigenous
peoples, was in many ways practiced, it was in many ways a precursor and
forerunner to the situation today in the United States. In fact, some of
the architects of the philosophies of when the government brands someone a
threat to the national security, both today and 30 years ago, those
architects included Donald Rumsfeld and Cheney who were White House people
back in the early-mid 70s. Their plan, their program, and that of others,
to basically say that people who stand up and say that something is wrong
should have no rights, but of course not couching it in those terms,
couching it in the terms of if someone is considered a domestic security
threat then the constitution should not apply to them, the basic
fundamental protections of due process should not be afforded to them.
This has been a long time in the running and against the Indigenous
movement there were many programs that were instituted that were carried
out in an effort to how can..., and Indigenous people being politically
powerless. In South Dakota, for example, the Pine Ridge Indian reservation
being a place of political vacuum in terms of influencing national policy,
the government felt that it could do whatever it want ed to people, and in
fact did. And so it was able to, in fact, to carry out very extreme
policies that even went so far as state sponsorship of a para-military
group that called itself the GOON* squad that understood its mission was
in fact to destroy the American Indian Movement, and actually engaged in
acts of terrorism that resulted in the deaths of scores of men, woman, and
children on Pine Ridge who were from traditional families, whether they
were active members of the American Indian Movement or not, as well as the
violent assaults, including rapes of men and women, on the reservation in
an effort to create a climate of fear and terror, which in fact they did.
And this led to a confrontation after Wounded Knee outside the communi ty
of Oglala in which three young men were tragically killed. All three were
shot in the head. As was typical with the United States they only
considered that really two people died, two FBI agents. The position taken
of the people who were attacked that day was that three people died
tragically. And I think that really says it all in terms of the
differences in attitudes of the respective sides.
DG: And during this time there were 60 Indians killed?
BE: There were as many as 60 plus men, women and children, Indian men,
women and children that were killed. And the FBI even, say within the last
five or six years, issued a white paper about that in which they, for the
first time, investigated many of those deaths. And you would find things
like "well so and so was stabbed multiple times but they were examined by
our forensic pathologist who said they died of exposure." So really there
has never been any investigation into many of these deaths.
DG: My next question is, of all these deaths how many of them have been
solved?
BE: There were probably less than half a dozen solved. Whenever a GOON
squad member or someone connected with the BIA police was implicated in
the murders, usually if they were prosecuted as murders, they were
resolved as something else. For example, there was a BIA criminal
investigator by the name of Paul Herman who was implicated in the torture
murder of a 14 year old girl by the name of Sandra Wounded Foot. She was
raped, she was tortured, her body was found tied to a barbed wire fence.
He was allowed to plead guilty to a manslaughter charge and did about
three and a half years in prison. So itīs that kind of a situation, and of
course his prosecution was years after the murder took place and really
was no justice at all. So many of
those situations just simply went unresolved or where the government
prosecutors in fact allowed cases to be turned into going after the
victims rather than who was responsible for the murders and trying to
therefore interfere with the ability of justice to happen in those
particular cases. So many of those cases therefore remain unsolved. Calls
for congressional investigations and other investigations into the FBI's
complicity with the murders on Pine Ridge have continuously fallen on
deaf ears. Any time an inquiry seemed to be started, and there were times
when that did seem like it might happen, where there would be a public
congressional hearing in front of a committee with subpoena power, it was
very quickly quashed before any hea
rings took place.
DG: Now with that said and the amount of murders that took place and how
few of them, you said have been prosecuted, why is there such a political
interest around the Anna Mae Pictou Aquash murder?
BE: Well, because the government is not seriously interested in solving
the murder of Anna Mae Aquash Pictou. What the government is trying to do
is to utilize her murder, currently, in an effort to paint the American
Indian Movement as a terrorist, violent organization rather than being so
many of the victims. One of the questions that many people have had for 30
years has been why has there been no interest in all of the murders,
including Anna Maeīs, on the Pine Ridge reservation? To select her murder
out alone is to suggest, and in fact has shown to be, a politically
motivated manipulation of both her family and of the community in an
effort to ignore the other murders that the government was so directly
complicit in.
DG: Are you still in contact with Leonard Peltier? You are not his lawyer
any more but...
BE: No, Iīm not his lawyer any more and we actually havenīt spoken in a
few years.
DG: So are you not on good terms with him at this point or are you just...
BE: At this point I am not his lawyer. He is currently in Louisburg,
Pennsylvania. The government is doing what it can to isolate him and has
been trying to isolate him in all ways ever since they picked him up in
Canada.
DG: And also my next question is, do you think that Arlo Looking Cloud was
given a fair trial and a fair hearing?
BE: Well you know, the purpose of Arlo Looking Cloud's trial was basically
to present the paid for testimony of a former associate to claim falsely
that Leonard Peltier had confessed to killing the agents. The real
purpose, one of the purposes at trial, was to have testimony under oath
that Leonard Peltier had said that he had killed the agents so as to
forever deny him parole. The government has, in every parole hearing - and
Leonard Peltier has been eligible for parole since 1986 - in every parole
hearing they have said to him: we will not consider you seriously for
parole until you say that you killed the agents. And so what that
testimony did was it provided a factual basis upon which to deny relief
consistent with that theme. That was one of the aspects of it, to suggest
that Leonard Peltier had anything to do with Anna Maeīs death is an
outrage and yet it was also designed by that trial to try and create a
further schism within the Indian community, with people who support
Leonard Peltier, with the people who have been striving to get an
investigation of all of the murders that occurred on Pine Ridge during
that period of time in which Anna Mae was murdered. And what is very
clear, from documents that have been obtained even within recent years,
was that the FBI knew who she was and knew that she had been murdered, and
yet still put out that she had died of exposure.
DG: In the first autopsy?
BE: In the first autopsy report. The FBI interviewed medical personnel who
examined her body after it was found prior to the first autopsy and all of
the medical people said, without question, that she had been shot in the
back of the head. How could a supposedly trained forensic pathologist, how
could a trained criminal investigator with the FBI named William Wood be
at the first autopsy and not see what was obvious to everyone? To then
bury her under an assumed name, to mutilate her body by cutting off her
hands, is inexcusable and the governmentīs contention that now they are
interested in justice for Anna Mae is belied by the history of their
efforts to cover up her murder from the very beginning. And it was only
when we pushed for a second autopsy, because at that time I was a staff
attorney with the Wounded Knee Defense Committee, they knew that we were
going to get another autopsy, they knew that we were going to in fact find
out that she had been murdered, that they come out publicly and begin
their public orchestration that she had been murdered because people
thought that she was an informant. You know one of the things that is very
interesting is the government had a program also, and I guess the Black
Panther Party shortly before this time period, and part of their program
was called "snitch jacket program." And they were successful in killing,
according to attorneys who represented people within the Black Panthers,
at least one and possibly two people wit hin the Party who were falsely
branded as government informants, as an effort to disrupt the movement,
and do what they did similarly in Anna Maeīs situation.
DG: And now we have got a full turnaround. Years later they are trying to
extradite a fellow Canadian named John Graham and the only evidence it
appears is questionable testimony from Arlo Looking Cloud, and he is
facing extradition and he feels, and so does his lawyer here in Canada,
that he will not get a fair trial in the United States.
BE: Well there is a real question about whether Arlo Looking Cloud got a
fair trial. The fact that his conviction was affirmed on appeal says
nothing about the fairness of the prosecution of the trial which resulted
in that conviction. As a criminal justice lawyer working within the
criminal justice system for over 30 years I can state unequivocally that
our system is broke. Our system often operates in politically motivated
fashions and Arlo Looking Cloudīs trial had nothing to do with whether he
was really involved in the death of Anna Mae Aquash and had more to do
with a political agenda by the United States government and hopefully at
some point he will get a fair trial and then whatever the results will be
will be the results, but I think that with John Graham, there is a serious
question about whether he would get a fair trial within the United States.
I have heard that there are some irregularities that have been occurring
up here with some of the evidence that has been presented. If the
government has nothing to hide, if the government feels in the
righteousness of their actions, then they shouldnīt be doing these things
and so it certainly raises questions for John Graham, for any Indigenous
person, for any person being brought to prosecution in the United States.
DG: Well I mean, itīs a fact that we find out later on that the FBI lied
on some information when Leonard Peltier was extradited from Canada.
BE: Clearly. I mean they fabricated through coerced evidence, alleged eye
witness testimony, and why would they have to do that if their position
was righteous? It is inexcusable. The people who are responsible for that
fabricated evidence were also involved in the initial cover-up in Anna
Maeīs murder. William Wood was one of the agents. David Price. This is not
just a pattern. These people were domestic security agents. They always
tried to couch their actions in claiming that they were engaged in
legitimate criminal prosecutions and thatīs all they were doing. But there
was a political agenda and unfortunately what the political agenda
required was the use of fabricated evidence and that is not the way the
American criminal justice s ystem is supposed to work nor the Canadian
criminal justice system nor should the United States government be
extraditing people based on fabricated evidence. And we know that is for
sure in Leonard Peltierīs case. He was denied relief here, he was denied
relief in the United States and he remains in prison for something he
didnīt do.
You know, when you look at the list of dead from that time period they
were almost all AIM people and the fact that the government has decided to
focus in on prosecutions where AIM people may have been involved and
totally ignoring the overwhelming majority of those deaths where the GOON
squad and by direct connection the FBI, because you know the former GOON
squad in a published media interview acknowledged they knew their job
working with the FBI, was to destroy AIM and they knew that they could do
anything that they wanted to and would not be held accountable for it. So,
you know, I would certainly be calling upon, as I have in the past and as
others have, there should be a full congressional public hearing into the
investigations of
all of those deaths.
DG: Why isnīt there?
BE: Because it is not something that the American government is willing to
do because of what it would reveal. The United States government doesnīt
sponsor terrorism, it claims, the United States government doesnīt
prosecute people for political reasons, it claims, the United States
government doesnīt fabricate evidence to put people in prison for crimes
they didnīt do because of their political activism, it claims. Because
what we are talking about is the fundamentals of whether we have a free
and democratic system in society within the United States and the illusion
is more important than dealing with the reality.
I will give you another example of another incident of a lesser known
person, one that I was involved in investigating. There was a young man by
the name of Byron Desersa who lived on Pine Ridge, he was a Lakota. His
father ran an underground newspaper that published a lot of articles about
what the U.S. government sponsored administration on Pine Ridge, the Dick
Wilson administration was doing. Byron also did some work for the Wounded
Knee Defense Committee, which I was a member of at the time. Byron was on
his way to a community to find out what had happened to a friend of his
who had resisted an armed GOON attack against his family where the GOONS
shot out the back windows of his car as he and his wife and infant child
pulled into th e driveway and he managed to get in the house, had a single
shot 22 and was responding to semiautomatic weapons fire and the BIA SWAT
team came and arrested him for disorderly conduct in his own home. So
Byron Desersa was on his way to investigate the arrest of his friend when
a caravan of GOONS pulled past his car and shot up his car. He was hit so
badly that he bled to death although he was a quarter of a mile from an
aid station. The government gave a deal to one of those GOONS who was
involved because the two primary people involved in that murder was Dick
Wilsonīs son and another leading GOON squad member and the FBI worked out
a deal that this guy would get five years if he would say that the GOONS
acted in self defense and so Dic k Wilsonīs son and this other man were
acquitted and that guy got five years. So, and then the GOONS had not only
engaged over a day and a half in fire bombing homes and shooting homes
within the community of Wanblee, outside of which Byron Desersa was
murdered, but when the SWAT team came in from the Bureau of Indian Affairs
they disarmed the community members and always stayed at least two blocks
away from where the GOONS had taken over two homes and fortified them. I
watched as, the following morning, because the elders in that community
asked for the American Indian Movement to come in and gave the GOONS until
noon the following day to leave or they were going to be taken out. Before
noon the FBI, BIA SWAT team, drove up to that hou se where the GOONS were
holed up for the first time, and escorted the GOONS out of town with
automatic weapons, which were illegal, and semiautomatic weapons, and
escorted them out. There were never any prosecutions for the fire
bombings, never any prosecutions for the shooting up the homes. So that to
me is another simply graphic example that I have personal knowledge of
that occurred during that period of time.
DG: If there is ever any example what they call divide and conquer this
has got to be the biggest?
BE: Well...
DG: Youīve got people killing their own people.
BE: Well, thatīs been the American way for a long time. I mean whether it
be Vietnam or Iraq it is an old story that the government seems to feel
largely works for them. And as it was as, and one might analogize in Iraq
where our government can set up much like the BIA, where the Iraqis can do
whatever they want to as long as the U.S. government approves and itīs all
about oil there. While during the early 1970s in the areas of Western
South Dakota it was about uranium and oil and gold and silver and natural
gas and coal. There were 27 multinational corporations that had come into
that area and leased or claimed the entire region for mining operations
and it was the same period of time that, according to FBI documents, the
FBI noted a c hange in AIM and its philosophies and its goals. And while
calling AIM one of the most dangerous organizations in the country it
talked about not only was it in favor of things like equal job
opportunities, equal housing opportunities, justice within the criminal
justice system, but it noted that AIM had shifted its emphasis towards
stopping strip mining operations which were destroying the Earth. So you
know the old adage of follow the money and it seems that in support of
such activities the United States government is willing to go to whatever
lengths it feels it needs to do in order to allow those operations to
happen and not to allow dissent. You know in the U.S. Patriot Act you get
investigated by the joint terrorism task force if
you oppose any governmental policies or corporate policies within your
community. We have a fulltime federal anti-terrorism prosecutor in Rapid
City where the only incidents of terrorism that occurred were by the GOON
squad and there has never been an interest in investigating them.
DG: So you donīt see things getting better any time soon do you?
BE: I donīt think that the darkness has fully enveloped us yet.
DG: When will we get the ending of this story? When will people start
fessing up to what happened and who did what, especially with the Anna Mae
murder, I mean when do you think this will ever resolve itself?
BE: I donīt know if it ever will because somewhere in the background of
all of this, the FBI is dirty. It was FBI informants who first started the
rumors within AIM that Anna Mae was an informant. It was FBI informants
who perpetrated that rumor. And there are some of us who believe that
there was an FBI operative who was ultimately behind and was responsible
for the death of Anna Mae. So whether that will ever be exposed or not the
government certainly is doing whatever it can no to allow that to happen.
DG: Who would you venture to think might have the answers to some of these
questions?
BE: Well, there is an FBI agent by the name of David Price, we think he
might know, there is an FBI agent by the name of William Wood, we think he
might know, there are probably others but Price was the major liaison with
the GOON squad, was the major liaison with the informants that had
infiltrated the American Indian Movement.
DG: Well what about within the AIM movement?
BE: We donīt know. Weīll see, weīll see what happens.
DG: Would that be something that would be within their realm, of kind of
the revolution, that someone would call a hit on Anna Mae?
BE: I have no idea. I know what the allegations are, okay, and she may
have been the victim of one of these snitch jacketing campaigns that the
FBI launched. You know whether or not the people who were actually
responsible for that, if that was the case, will be publicly exposed, that
remains to be seen. But what is clear is that the government seems to be
interested in silencing voices from back during that time period. We know
that the FBI right now, and for the last number of years and during the
context of which the Looking Cloud trial took place, the FBI has been
going and hiring people and threatening people into working for them and
going back and talking to people who they worked with 25 to 30 years ago,
wiring up, calling them on the phone and talking to them in person,
ostensibly to solve old murders but really seemingly to go after people
who were voices back then and are still voices today. Whether or not they
had anything to do with the deaths of the people, where deaths actually
occurred, and that seems to be whatīs going on here.
DG: I have one last question for you. How come when all this was going on
and Arlo Looking Cloudīs and John Grahamīs name was coming up and they
were moving Anna Mae to the house and this and that, Theda Clark was named
throughout this whole ordeal. How come she was never charged or
investigated or whatever?
BE: Youīll have to ask the US attorneyīs office.
DG: Itīs a curious question.
BE: Absolutely. Maybe you donīt want a woman who is suffering from
dementia and is virtually paralyzed sitting in a wheelchair in the
courtroom.
DG: Thank you very much.
BE: Youīre welcome.
___________________________________
* GOON = Guardians of the Oglala Nation, a term used by then Tribal
Chairman Dick Wilson.
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